Randomised nonsense.

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I’m always looking for the next great thing when it comes to Search. Google is great but I can’t help but feel it could be better. Since attending a developer course for FAST ESP back in January I’ve been looking for a Search provider that does more for navigating results rather than just allowing you to page through X thousand results until you get bored and try other search terms.

Microsoft may have hit the nail on the head with Bing.com. Whilst I think the interface could do with a bit more thought, the features are spot on.

Unfortunately Safari browser on MacOS is tied to Google.com as the search provider. Change the search provider requires changing the source code of the application… or Glims – a nifty Safari plugin.

Once Glims is downloaded and installed, open the Safari Preferences and under the Glims tab select “Search Engines”.

You then need to add a new search engine with the following settings:

For the copy-paste folks out there, the url should be: http://www.bing.com/search?q=#query#

You can drag-drop the Bing search engine to the top of the Glims search engines list. Also, select Bing from the search engines drop-down in the search box of a Safari browser window.

I’m not sure if this is required for it to work, but you may need to set your Bing.com region to being the U.S.A.: http://bit.ly/42kg8

@snop, I’ve taken a look at that site. It does have a very interesting idea behind it but it is still just layering functionality over what is very simple result set – plus I found it very difficult to engineer the results I wanted from a simple query.

I love Bing. I feel bad because I do love yahoo as a company and I like their homepage but Bing just got it right and it’s easy to use. I hate to say it because I’m a big MAC user but I think Microsoft is making a comeback for me. Windows 7 will allow touch (which Apple should have done after the first ipod touch was released)
and their Zune has picked up it’s features and looks pretty slick, and now Bing. MAC still rules for their o/s and easy integration though and I think that will always be the case. But for now I’m going to BING IT!

I switched from Google to Bing and haven’t looked back. Results are not as revelant as Google, but the way they are presented more than makes up for this. They are good enough results for my work. I don’t need billions of detailed hits, just some good ones, plus the UI is better than Google’s blank white page — boy did I get tired of that homepage.